Like Omar he might have said "I myself am Heaven and h.e.l.l"----for within himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power, every feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is capable. The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study of the human race. His knowledge came from minute self-examination--for he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together. It was by concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing works of such pure naturalness and utter verity. A humour which is at bottom good humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more universal appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation of the human species, of the universal "Genus h.o.m.o".
It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual life of Europe derives from history. If American literature be really "Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions," as defined by the Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical product of American literature. A certain modic.u.m of truth may rest in this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy past. Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself, and so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living present. He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of the ranks of American journalism. Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as his early writing was, at times provincial and coa.r.s.e, it bore upon its face the fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.
To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be placidly a.s.sured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the a.s.severation that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay. The New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the pa.s.sion for extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth in America eternally gives to old age. "America has produced great artists," admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains that "that fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young G.o.ds making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man." This sweet and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr.
Chesterton has chosen to ill.u.s.trate his ludicrous paradox, the two American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the ongoing rush and progress of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr.
James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid _diablerie_, was wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America"s pathetic senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case in the vehement a.s.sertion that America"s greatest national interpreter is--Mark Twain!
To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the humorist--with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering, ludicrous contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within himself a "certain surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a sense of conquest" which typified the youth of America. It is memorable that he breathed in his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the collective ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western adventure, and expressed the crude and manly energy of navigation, exploration, and the daring hazard for new fortune. To those who knew him in personal intimacy, the quality that was outstanding, omnipresent and eternally ineradicable from his nature was--paradoxical as it may sound--not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that might be a.s.sociated with his name, but--the spirit of eternal youth. It is comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright nickname--"Youth." Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller of tales, pungent as stylist. But he has achieved another sort of eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans. "They distinguish in his writings," says an acute French critic, "exalted and sublimated by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force and of faith; they love his philosophy, at once practical and high --minded. They are fond of his simple style, animated with verve and spice, thanks to which his work is accessible to every cla.s.s of readers.
They think he describes his contemporaries with such an art of distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France for Balzac."
Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only, that the world seems to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the "philosophy of the Broad Grin." Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that "American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world." This partial and somewhat conventional foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the c.u.mulative and "sky-breaking" humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax too extreme.
The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature.
In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic and sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously at one another, plotted dementedly in circ.u.mvention of each other"s plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and G.o.d. Deep in their hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence.
What, after all, is "The Jumping Frog" but the elaborate narrative, in native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in the life of Angel"s Camp. It was Mark Twain who "created" the story: he endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization of _une chose vue_, which went round the world. The humour of rustic shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in "The Innocents Abroad", was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the early journalistic days in San Francisco. In "The Golden Era" an excellent example is found in the following observations upon a celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San Francisco:
"Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No, sir. The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet.
Them scissors is too modern; thar warn"t no scissors like them in them days--by a d---d sight."
That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just proportion of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain"s offer, during his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the cannibals consume their food--if only some lady would lend him a live baby. There is the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious anecdote of Higgins.
Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul rock; and on the day Judge Bagley fell down the court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins was commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the house of Mrs.
Bagley and break the news to her as gently as possible. When he arrived, he shouted until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then tactfully inquired if the Widder Bagley lived there! When she indignantly replied in the negative, he gently humoured her whim; and inquired next if Judge Bagley lived there. When she replied that he did, Higgins offered to bet that he didn"t; and delicately inquired if the Judge were in. On being a.s.sured that he was not in at present, Higgins triumphantly exclaimed that he expected as much. Because he had the old Judge curled up out there in the wagon; and when Mrs. Bagley saw him, she would doubtless admit that about all that could comfort the Judge now would be an inquest!
Mark Twain was so fond of this b.l.o.o.d.y and ghastly humour that, on one occasion, he utterly overreached himself and suffered serious consequences. In the words of his fellow-journalist, Dan De Quille:
Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style, but on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease worked its own cure. He wrote an account of a terrible murder, supposed to have occurred at "Dutch Nick"s," a station on the Carson River, where Empire City now stands. He made a man cut his wife"s throat and those of his nine children, after which diabolical deed the murderer mounted his horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a distance of three and a half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter Hopkins" saloon.
All the California papers copied the item, and several made editorial comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast. Of course rival Virginia City papers at once denounced the item as a "cruel and idiotic hoax." They showed how the publication of such "shocking and reckless falsehoods" disgraced and injured the State, and they made it as "sultry" as possible for the "Enterprise" and its "fool reporter."
When the California papers saw all this and found they had been sold, there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego. Some papers demanded the immediate discharge of the author of the item by the "Enterprise" proprietors. They said they would never quote another line from that paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item remained on its force. All this worried Mark as I had never before seen him worried. Said he: "I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains." We roomed together, and one night, when the persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud. So I set to work to comfort him. "Mark," said I, "never mind this bit of a gale, it will soon blow itself out. This item of yours will be remembered and talked about when all your other work is forgotten. The murder at Dutch Nick"s will be quoted years from now as the big sell of these times."
Said Mark: "I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing at home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death.
I was a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I had an uncle living. I at once left the town and did not return to it for three years. When I finally came back I found I was only remembered as "the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.""
Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that moment "ceased to groan." He was not discharged, and in less than a month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the "murder at Dutch Nick"s."
Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as alt.i.tudinous as the conditions which gave it birth. Mark Twain may be said to have created, and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of humorous narration. At times it seemed little more than a sort of infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all the calculation of detail and elaboration. There was something in it of the volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of primitive nature. It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the structure toppled over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian crash of laughter which echoed among the stars. Whenever Mark Twain conceived a humorous idea, he seemed capable of extracting from it infinite complications of successive and c.u.mulative comedy. This humour seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance, until reason itself tired and gave over. Such explosive stories as "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper", "A Genuine Mexican Plug", the deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, "The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art. "The excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The rack, tragic or comic, goes round until something breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his heart, or perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite know what it is--perhaps his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly cracked." Mark Twain"s mountainous humour, of this early type, never contains the element of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected, the _imprevu_. We know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and more to the mood of the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until laughter, no longer to be restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of undignified and explosive mirth. Perhaps no better example can be given than the description of the sad fate of the camel in "A Tramp Abroad".
In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of his overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of apparel, he began to inspect it as an article of diet. In his inimitable manner, Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that camel as it devoured his overcoat piecemeal--first one sleeve, then the other, velvet collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the camel struck a batch of ma.n.u.script--containing some of Mark"s humorous letters for the home papers. Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy on the camel"s stomach: the jokes shook him until he began to gag and gasp, and finally he struck statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He died in horrible agony; and Mark found on examination that the camel had choked to death on one of the mildest statements of fact that he had ever offered to a trusting public! Here Mark gradually works up to an antic.i.p.ated climax by piling on effect after effect. Our risibility is excited almost as much by the antic.i.p.ation of the climax as by the recital.
Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of the nonsensical recital, are found in the scene in "Huckleberry Finn" dealing with the performance of the King"s Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the address on the occasion of the dinner in honour of the seventieth anniversary of John Greenleaf Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath in "The Innocents Abroad".
In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant sat him down by a tank of hot water and began to polish him all over with a coa.r.s.e mitten.
Soon Mark noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that the more he was polished the worse he smelt. He urged the attendant to bury him without unnecessary delay, as it was obvious that he couldn"t possibly "keep" long in such warm weather. But the phlegmatic attendant paid no attention to Mark"s commands and continued to scrub with renewed vigour.
Mark"s consternation changed to alarm when he discovered that little cylinders, like macaroni, began to roll from under the mitten. They were too white to be dirt. He felt that he was gradually being pared down to a convenient size. Realizing that it would take hours for the attendant to trim him down to the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered him to bring a jackplane at once and get the matter over. To all his protests the attendant paid no attention at all.
In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark Twain, which appeared in "Appleton"s Journal of Literature, Science and Art" for July 4,1874, Mr. G. T. Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour.
"Of humour in its highest phase," he says, "perhaps Bret Harte may be accounted the most puissant master among our contemporary American writers. Of wit, we see next to none. Mark Twain, while lacking the subtilty and pathos of the other, has more breadth, variety, and ease.
His sketches of life are arabesque in their strange combinations. Bits of bright, serious description, both of landscape and society, carry us along till suddenly we stumble on some master-stroke of grotesque and irresistible fun. He understands the value of repose in art. One tires of a page where every sentence sparkles with points, and the author is constantly att.i.tudinizing for our amus.e.m.e.nt. We like to be betrayed into laughter as much in books as in real life. It is the unconscious, easy, careless gait of Mark Twain that makes his most potent charm. He seems always to be catering as much to his own enjoyment as to that of the public. He strolls along like a great rollicking schoolboy, bent on having a good time, and determined that his readers shall have it with him."
Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists. He takes his courage in his hands for the wildest flights of fancy. His humour is the caricature of situations, rather than of individuals; and he is not afraid to risk his characters in colossally ludicrous situations. His art reveals itself in choosing ludicrous situations which contain such a strong colouring of naturalness that one"s sense of reality is not outraged, but t.i.tillated. Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not lend itself readily to quotation. His early humour is not epigrammatic, but c.u.mulative and extensive. Each scene is a unit and must appear as such. Andrew Lang not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain"s earlier manner, when he speaks of his "almost Mephistophelean coolness, an unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the mean possibilities of the sublime--these with a native sense of incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration."
Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker.
He discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas.
He offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of fun. "If he puts his private mark on it, it will pa.s.s current; it does not require the mint stamp of the schools of humour. He is never afraid of being laughed at." Indeed, that is a large part of his stock-in-trade; for throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give him so much pleasure--though it is one of the lowest forms of humour--as making fun of himself. In describing two monkeys that got into his room at Delhi, he said that when he awoke, one of them was before the gla.s.s brushing his hair, and the other one had his notebook, and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. He didn"t mind the one with the hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam--only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored, but he struck water"--is an admirable example of the mechanical fooling of self-ridicule.
In his penetrating study, "Mark Twain a Century Hence", published at the time of Mr. Clemens" death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation: "We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote rather than by the more dubious productions, in which we fail to see at every moment the winning qualities and the characteristic form of this very interesting American. As one would not judge of Tennyson by his dramas, nor Thackeray by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter Scott by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity had been exhausted, so we must not judge Mark Twain by the dozen or more specimens which belong to the later period, when he was ill at ease and growing old. Let us rather go back with a sort of joy to what he wrote when he did so with spontaneity, when his fun was as natural to him as breathing, and when his humour was all American humour--not like that of Juvenal or Hierocles--acrid, or devoid of anything individual--but br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with exactly the same rich irresponsibility which belonged to Steele and Lamb and Irving. It may seem odd to group a son of the New World and of the great West with those earlier cla.s.sic figures who have been mentioned here; yet upon a.n.a.lysis it will be discovered that the humour of Mark Twain is at least first cousin to that which produced Sir Roger de Coverley and Rip Van Winkle and The Stout Gentleman."
The details of the Gambetta-Fourtou duel, in which Mark played a somewhat frightened second, have furnished untold amus.e.m.e.nt to thousands. And his description of the inadvertent _faux pas_ he committed at his first public lecture is humorous for any age and society. The sign announcing the lecture read--"Doors open at 7. The Trouble will begin at 8." For three days, Mark had been in a state of frightful suspense. Once his lecture had seemed humorous; but as the day approached, it seemed to him to be but the dreariest of fooling, without a vestige of real fun. He was so panic-stricken that he persuaded three of his friends, who were giants in stature, genial and stormy voiced, to act as claquers and pound loudly at the faintest suspicion of a joke. He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk man, who had a laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to get off, naturally and easily during the course of the evening, as many laughs as he could. He begged a popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous seat in a box, so that everybody could see them. He explained that when he needed help, he would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had given birth to an obscure joke. Then, if ever, was her time--not to investigate, but to respond!
The fateful night found him in the depths of dejection. But heartened up by a crowded house, full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and proceeded to capture the house. His claquers hammered madly whenever the very feeblest joke showed its head. Sawyer supported their herculean efforts with bursts of stentorian laughter. As Mark explained, not without a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared so royally before. But his hour of humiliation was at hand. On delivering a bit of serious matter with impressive unction, to which the audience listened with rapt interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if for her approval, at his friend in the box. He remembered the compact, but it was too late--he smiled in spite of himself. Forth came her ringing laugh, peal after peal, which touched off the whole audience: the explosion was immense! Sawyer choked with laughter, and the bludgeons performed like pile-drivers. The little morsel of pathos was ruined; but what matter, so long as the audience took it as an intentional joke, and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm. Mark wisely let it go at that!
Reading through "The Innocents Abroad" after many years, I find that it has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and the same may be said of "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator", which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and restraint. His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had been curious all his literary life. He never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Could there be a more accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his writings, in especial of his travel notes? Like his mother, he too never used large words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. How delightfully human is his comment on the vagaries of woman"s shopping! Human nature he found very much the same all over the world; and he felt that it was so much like his dear native home to see a Venetian lady go into a store, buy ten cents" worth of blue ribbon, and then have it sent home in a scow. It was such little touches of nature as this which, as he said, moved him to tears in those far-off lands. In speaking of Palestine, he says that its holy places are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them. Indeed, he a.s.serts that if one be calm and resolute, he can look on their beauty and live! He bequeathed his rheumatism to Baden-Baden. It was little, but it was all he had to give. His only regret was that he could not leave something more catching.
There is nothing better in all of "The Innocents Abroad" than his a.n.a.lysis of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
Disclaiming all intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he solemnly declared that his observations had taught him the real way the Holy Personages were ranked in Rome. "The Mother of G.o.d," otherwise the Virgin Mary, comes first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and Martyrs. Last of all came Jesus Christ the Saviour--but even then, always as an infant in arms!
Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for his mother"s sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs, and found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and rubbish of two thousand years ago!
Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive character known as "Mark Twain." At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic wit known as "G. B. S." To the composition of "Mark Twain" went all the wild humour of ignorance--the boisterously comic admixture of the sanguinary and the stoical. The humour of "The Jumping Frog" and "The Innocents Abroad" is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not the sophisticated humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme.
Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the _nil admirari_ att.i.tude of "Mark Twain" no more enlightening nor suggestive than the stoicism of the North American Indian. This mirthful and mock-innocent naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples.
The English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in this gay fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but half-concealed shrewdness. They laughed at this unsophisticated _naif_, gazing in wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life. The note of this early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy.
Deliberately a.s.sumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and his companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide --one of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name of Ferguson. After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended ignorance, they finally asked him if the mummy was dead. When Ferguson glibly replied that he had been dead three thousand years, he was dumbfounded at the fury of the "doctor" for being imposed upon with vile second-hand carcases. The poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn"t bring out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him! No wonder that, later, when he was asked for a description of the party, Ferguson laconically remarked that they were lunatics!
In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once remarked: "We have made a fias...o...b..th in the heroic and the lover roles. The only parts in which we have shown a little talent, are the naively comic; but with our more highly developed self-consciousness we shall no longer be fitted even for that." With time and "our more highly developed self --consciousness" have largely pa.s.sed the novelty and the charm of this early naively comic humour of Mark Twain. But it is as valid still, as it was in 1867, to record honestly the impressions directly communicated to one by the novelties, peculiarities, individual standards and ideals of other peoples and races. Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter disregard for other people"s opinions, the dicta of criticism or the authoritative judgment of the schools. "The Innocents Abroad" is eminently readable, not alone for its humour, its clever journalism, its remarkably accurate and detailed information, and its fine descriptions.
The rare quality, which made it "sell right along--like the Bible," is that it is the vital record of a keen and searching intelligence. Mark Twain found so many of the "masterpieces of the world" utterly unimpressive and meaningless to him, that he actually began to distrust the validity of his own impressions. Every time he gloried to think that for once he had discovered an ancient painting that was beautiful and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave him was an infallible proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in any sense worthy of commendation! He pours out the torrents of his ridicule, not indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters themselves--though he regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old masters--but upon those half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an art they do not understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by mouthings full of cheap and meaningless tags. As potent and effective as ever, in its fine comic irony, is that pa.s.sage in which he expresses his "envy" of those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of art which their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor understand.
He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand critics who accept other people"s opinions for their criteria, and rave over "beauty," "soul," "character," "expression" and "tone" in wretched, dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation such people--whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of inexpressive technical terms of art criticism.
There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain"s records of foreign travel. To the things which he personally reverenced, he was always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless. Grant as we may the humorist"s right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes of his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments, however forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms. One"s enjoyment of his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is, in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the mult.i.tude. "The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid,"
says Mr. S. P. Sherman, "refuses to sink his ident.i.ty in the object contemplated--that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humour of it. He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why you went abroad. He turns the Old World into a laughing stock by shearing it of its storied humanity--simply because there is nothing in him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was Rome--simpler because nothing is holier to him than a joke. He does not throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm; he laughs at art, history, and antiquity from the point of view of one who is ignorant of them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance." This picture reminds us of the foreign critics of "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur"s Court": it is too partial and restricted. The whole point of Mark Twain"s humour, as exhibited in these travel notes, is missed in the statement that "he does not throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm"--for this might almost be taken as the "philosophy" of his books of foreign travel. And yet Mr.
Sherman"s dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the question whether, as he intimates, the "overwhelming majority" of his fellow-citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain"s point of view, and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not at him, but with him.
In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his humour with the pa.s.sage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: "I succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being funny. The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had to live down my past. When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard. My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people laugh. I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else --eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days, Tom Fitch, the "silver-tongued orator of Nevada," said to me: "Clemens, your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin--the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced. My dear Clemens, whatever you do, never sell your audience." And that,"
continued Mr. Clemens, "was my first really profitable lesson."
It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance--Fitch"s precept not to "sell" his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks" warning not to try their endurance of the irreverent too far--that had a markedly salutary effect upon Mark Twain"s humorous writings. There can be no doubt that the deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as occasion demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence upon Mark Twain"s tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong exaggeration. In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation--the humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car, so to speak--and turned to fiction. Now at last the long pent-up flood of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full vent. "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" are the romances of eternal youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. They are freighted, however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that have made of them contemporary cla.s.sics. From ethical sophistication and moral truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour.
The revolt of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern limitations of formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he carried with him to the grave. "There are no more vital pa.s.sages in his fiction," says Mr. Howells, "than those which embody character as it is affected for good as well as for evil by the severity of the local Sunday-schooling and church-going." Out of the pangs of conscience, the ingenious sedatives of sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he won a wholesome humour that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the moral involved. Knowledge of human nature finds expression in forms made permanently effective through the arresting permeation of humour.
The incident of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of the fence is the sort of thing over which boy and man alike can chuckle with satisfaction--for Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of human action without knowing it, namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. Huck"s reasoning about chicken stealing--the exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality to expediency--is a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain"s humour. Following his father"s example, Huck would occasionally "lift"
a chicken that wasn"t roosting comfortable; for had his father not told him that even if he didn"t want the chicken himself, he could always find somebody that did want it, and a good deed ain"t never forgot?
Huck confesses that he had never seen his Pap when he didn"t want the chicken himself!
The germ of Mark Twain"s humour, wherever it is found, from "The Innocents Abroad" to "The Connecticut Yankee" and "Captain Stormfield"s Visit to Heaven", is found in the mental reactions resulting from stupendous and glaring contrasts. First it is the Wild Western humorist, primitive and untamed, running amuck through the petrified formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness. How many have delighted in the Yankee"s inimitable description of his feelings toward that cla.s.sic damsel of the sixth century? At first he got along easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for her a sort of mysterious and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to unwind one of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he could never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language!
Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries, savage and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous contrast; and he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire, as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types thirteen centuries apart. Not even heaven was safe from the comprehensive survey of his satire; and "Captain Stormfield"s Visit to Heaven" is a remarkable doc.u.ment,--a forthright lay sermon,--the conventional idea of heaven, the theologic conception of eternity, as heedlessly taught from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly significant, relief against the background of the common-sense of a deeply human, thoroughly modern intelligence.
Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later development of his humour; the love was there all the time. Mark Twain has not been recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and only secondarily a wit. But the pa.s.sion for brief and pungent formulation of an idea grew upon him; and Pudd"nhead Wilson"s Calendar is a mine of homely and memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction.